A professional movie pianist shares his experience playing for the pictures in the South and in the North.
A communication signed “Virginian” says: “Chicago’s letter in the Moving Picture World of July 1st is interesting reading, especially tor those of us who earn our daily bread and cheese by doping out piano music eight hours per day. I have worked North and South in the business and find a vast difference in the audiences. As a rule in the South they demand the best and most appropriate music to tell a picture story, and the life of a fake, noisy pianist is short indeed. The people are by inheritance temperamental and fall to tears and laughter instantly. All classes understand music by instinct and managers are hard to please.
“The accepted ‘correct music’ for any motion picture is only that which helps to unfold the plot or tell a story. It may be a medley of classic, operatic, comic, patriotic, or dramatic, but it must be so threaded together that it carries the audience on with the action of the story until ‘Passed by the National Board of Censors’ is flashed across the screen.
“Five years’ experience proved to my satisfaction that popular stuff can be successfully played into most pictures, but we can’t stand for death, renunciation or the pathetic to the tune of a popular rag or comic song. The Southern audiences won’t stand for it. They feel everything and I believe they were spoiled from the start by the very quality of pianists, really refined and educated men and women who took up the work tempted by the salaries. By degrees the fake pianist edged in, and perhaps he does not have a time making good.
“I lost my job on a try-out in a New York theater because the manager said, ‘You play well, but we want popular stuff so they can sing. Go back and try again.’ I doped out ‘Pony Boy’ and ‘My Wife’s Gone to the Country, Hurrah!’ and all the current songs and made good, but I couldn’t stand ‘My Wife’s Gone to the Country, Hurrah!’ shouted from a few hundred throats while I wanted to rescue the heroine from the burning ship with dramatic stuff. So I tried the Agency next day and found a really swell moving picture house where only continuous improvisations were allowed; absolutely nothing popular or that had ever been in print. Well, most of it would not have been received in the music stores, but the manager knew what his patrons demanded.
“I find that a wide knowledge of musical composition is essential, also a quick imagination and the power to make the audience feel the story. As a manager advised me years ago, ‘make your music tell the story; if it does not, it is all wrong.’ And how is a pianist to do this unless he is able to sink into the picture himself and let go of his imagination? It is sometimes—ofttimes—unappreciated work, but the audience can be led up to appreciation. Americans, as a mass, are only in process of forming a musical taste. They can be made to understand and enjoy a picture by the aid of music and not stop to realize whether it is a rag or comic, and thus forget to knock the music.”
I have heard of the excellent quality of music generally found in the Southern picture theaters. You infer that the Southern audience was “spoiled” in the beginning by its good quality of music. I wish more people were spoiled in the same way.
—“Music for the Picture,” by Clarence E. Sinn, in The Moving Picture World.